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Individual Presentation Assignment 55 Points
Due date for posting in the Individual Presentation forum in Discussions: Monday, 8/22, 11:59PM. For this presentation, you will choose an actual case, for discussion, much like what you did for Wks5-6Dsc. The list of cases from which to choose is in the Individual Presentation Assignment forum in Discussions. (Please note: this is an entirely new list of cases for the individual presentation assignment—you will be preparing a new post, and not using your Wks5-6Dsc chosen case.) You will be required to read/review the case, which you can locate in WestlawNext, as you learned to do, earlier in the quarter. Please do not post your individual presentation assignment in the Individual Presentation forum in Discussions until you have received and/or reviewed feedback from me to you and/or other students in the Wks5-6Dsc forum. In other words, even if I am not able to respond to your post right away, please review my responses to other students, because they will all highlight any form and/or content issues to be corrected, before finalizing the post for this assignment.
Item 1: Give the Case name/citation
The first part of your post in the body of your individual presentation post will be the full citation of your case. You should be able to post that in correct form by now, but it should be correctly cited in the list of available cases for the assignment.
Item 2: Give the factual background (and also include the procedural posture)
Next, you will give the factual background of the case. You would need to give enough information about the case that students reviewing your presentation post would be able to understand what had happened that gave rise to the dispute. (Remember—they won’t have read the case!) As I will have discussed with groups in group presentation practices, you will need to give the key facts material to the issue(s) you are covering for your presentation, without which, the cases would not exist. As an example, suppose you chose a Court of Appeals case called Roberts v. Jones, and the appellate justice who wrote the opinion included introductory language in the opinion that stated something like this:
On July 31, 2009, Bob Jones bought a boat for $15,000. He paid $3,000 down, and signed a promissory note (a written agreement to pay), with the seller, Mike Roberts, indicated as payee/promisee on the note, for the remaining $12,000. The note stated that the $12,000 payment was due in three years. The note was never paid. On August 10, 2015, Roberts sued Jones for the balance due on the note. The trial court granted summary judgment in favor of Roberts, and Jones appealed. This court acknowledges that the law of this state is that the statute of limitations for an action against a promisor for the promisor’s failure to pay a promissory note is six years.
For the Item 2 “factual background of the case,” you would just state what is highlighted in yellow as the factual background above, not paste into Discussions the entire paragraph.
Your last paragraph for Item 2 would be the procedural posture, which does not include the facts that occurred before the lawsuit was filed. It includes, instead, what happened after the lawsuit was filed. In my sample case, the only procedural posture would be that Roberts filed a lawsuit against Jones, and moved for summary judgment, the trial court granted summary judgment in favor of Roberts, and Jones appealed.
(Re-read the above if you are having trouble trying to figure out which part of a case is the material facts “case background,” and which part is the “procedural posture.”)
As part of that general background area of the law for Item 3 of the assignment, you would first cover the general legal topic or area of law mentioned in your case (here, the “statute of limitations” would have been in parentheses after the Roberts v. Jones citation on the list I would have given you in the Individual Presentation forum in Discussions to use to make your choice). You would explain what a statute of limitations is, by giving the definition of a “statute of limitations,” which you should be able to find in your lecture notes (once the notes are posted for Week 6—but the concept was also briefly discussed in Week 1), or in the online text, or via links provided by the instructor, and to explain how statutes of limitation work.
You should anticipate being “knowledgeable” about the general area of law mentioned in the parentheses from your choice of cases to present—check the lecture notes, YouTube lectures, etc., so that you know all the background law about the topic, rather than just relying on the case, itself, before finalizing your general area of law discussion. Rarely will one sentence be enough to give a complete explanation of the general law. Notice that there is no mention of the Roberts v. Jones case for this part of the presentation, in the example, above, and there should not be.
For Item 4 (the “issue” in the case) you would first determine the issue in your case, as has been discussed in Chat, and as you did for Part 1 of the group assignment, and for Wks5-6Dsc. In the promissory note case sample scenario I gave you, above, the issue would be: Did the seller, Roberts, timely sue the buyer, Jones, for Jones’ failure to pay the note?
The issue could also be phrased as:
Did the trial court err in granting Roberts’ motion for summary judgment, when Roberts sued for recovery of the promissory note proceeds within six years of the date when payment of the note was due, and the note had not yet been paid?
For Item 5 (Analysis), you would then explain the court’s analysis: that if the statute of limitations is six years, that six-year period does not begin to run until there has been actual injury, or breach of promise/contract, so the statute of limitations would not begin to run until the date the payment was due, and not paid, which would be July 31, 2012 (2009 plus the three years later, when, according to the terms of the note, payment on the note was due). The appellate court would determine that the trial court’s rationale that the six-year statute of limitations period began to run on July 31, 2012, the date that payment was due, and not paid, was correct.
For Item 6 (Court’s conclusion), you would then explain the appellate court’s conclusion, affirming the trial court’s decision, that the last day Roberts could sue Jones was six years from July 31, 2012, or July 31, 2018, and that Roberts’ suit was therefore timely filed, since it was filed before July 31, 2018.
The example above is a fairly simple case example, and you might choose a cited case with facts that are more complicated (this is usually what will happen).
The 55 total points for this assignment are calculated as follows:
--Presenter’s accurate identification and description of the background facts and general legal topics involved in the scenario/case assigned: 20 points
--Presenter’s accurate identification of the legal issue(s) presented in the case (be able to explain what the issue(s) was/were (but only the issue(s) based upon the topic the presenter was asked to cover, in the parentheses after the case citation), accurate explanation of how the court arrived at the conclusion it did, using legal concepts (the analysis)—e.g., in the sample case above, you would explain how the court applied the rule of how a statute of limitation works to the given case, did the math, and came up with an answer), and correct identification of the reviewing court’s conclusion/holding 30 points
--Presenter’s timely post in the correct forum in Discussions 1 point
--Presenter’s correct use of grammar, coverage of all steps indicated in the assignment, and correct spelling 4 points